Waverly jolts and pushes her chair back, causing a metallic grinding noise to beckon all eyes our way. Mrs. Davenport stops yammering about reactants and holds her marker in the air. She scans the classroom and spins around, resuming her lecture with an air of annoyance in her tone.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching a girl squirm from the heat of my stare. She was a delicate flower when I met her a few days ago. Now she’s blossoming right before my eyes.
Quiz sheets are passed to us and the teacher rains silence upon the classroom and mutters something about an hour.
An hour to take a quiz? I flip the sheet over. It’s thirty questions. I hate when teachers give way too much time for these. She probably wants some quiet time so she can do a little online shopping or Facebook browsing during work time. No one needs a whole fucking hour to take a thirty-question quiz.
That’s an hour of sitting here with my quiz finished and being unable to breathe a single word to Waverly. As pleased as I am that she touched herself last night, I want to make sure she’s okay. I’m not a complete asshole.
She finishes her test after fifteen silent minutes and turns it in before coming back to her spot and pulling a book out from her bag. I squint to see what she’s reading. Jane Austen. How classy. Of course she wouldn’t read anything modern. I doubt Mark Miller allows his precious daughter to be exposed to modern-day romance and all its oversexed dialogue.
I turn my quiz in and take my sketchpad from my bag along with a carbon pencil. Observing my surroundings, I’m left with minimal options. I can either draw a picture of the radiator to my left, the back of Claire Fahnlander’s narrow head, or Waverly reading. I opt for the latter.
Leaning back in my seat, I rest my pad across my lap, making broad strokes and creating the outline of her book’s profile. Her hair spills down the side of her face, covering all but the silhouette of her pointy nose and her dark lashes that curl up at the ends. There isn’t a speck of makeup on her face, but she doesn’t need it. The fluorescent light isn’t ideal, and the shadows it casts on her aren’t the most flattering, but none of it matters. She’s still fucking stunning.
Ten minutes pass and I’m almost done with the outline. I begin shading, finding myself in the early stages of getting lost and forgetting where I am. I don’t feel like I’m sitting in Chem class drawing my tragically pure stepsister. My mind is blank as I grip the pencil. I use my fingertips to smudge certain areas just a little. My hands will be gray by the time I’m done, but I don’t care.
That’s the beauty of art—it transports me. It makes me forget. There aren’t a lot of things I can lose myself in, but this is one of them. When I draw, I’m not an arrogant bastard. I’m not Jensen Mackey, son of Josiah. I’m not a hundred shades of fucked up in the head.
I’m just me.
Waverly shuts her book and pulls in a deep sigh as if she’s just read a beautiful passage and needs to let it marinate for a bit before she can move on. I know that feeling. I get that way after I draw something I never knew I was capable of drawing.
She turns to me demurely, her eyes falling on my paper and then narrowing as she realizes the girl on the paper is her. “You drew me?”
I shrug. “You were convenient.”
She pulls the sketchpad from my lap and inspects the grayscale drawing. Her eyes soften a bit and she fights a smile, not unlike the first time Juliette found my drawings for the first time.
“You do these?” Juliette asked, flipping through the pages of my sketchpad. Women. Nothing but beautiful women.
I was sixteen.
Playboys were contraband in my house and the vast majority of websites were adult-filtered on our family computer—I had to use my imagination. I held my breath until she came to the drawing I’d done of her from memory: a sketch of her seated at the family breakfast table when her peach satin robe had come untied, gaping open in the front to reveal her ample cleavage as it peeked out from the top of her matching teddy.
That was the first time I got hard for my father’s girlfriend.
Only I never saw her as a mother. She was always just… Juliette. And truth be told, Josiah treated her like his daughter most of the time, too. He controlled her. Told her what to wear and how to act. He treated her as if he were raising her, as if she were a teenager and not a thirty-something woman.
My only conclusion was that she enjoyed it—that and she had daddy issues up her tight, stripper ass.
When Juliette found the picture I’d drawn of her she stopped. I expected her to yell at me, to take it to my father, to scold me and tell me how dirty and fucked up I was. Instead she set the pad down gently on my nightstand and shut my bedroom door.
“Are you curious about me, Jensen?” she purred. Her overfilled lips curled into a smile. “It’s okay if you are. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m curious,” I said, sitting frozen on the edge of my bed. Juliette had never come onto me like this before. “Juliette, have you been drinking?”
Her fingers traced down the front of her white silk blouse until they found the top button. One by one, her blouse came undone. She stepped toward me, reaching down for my hand and placing it over the outside of her bra. The warmth of her body radiated through my palms and her breast overflowed in my hand.
“You’re not a virgin, are you?” she asked with a wicked glint in her eyes.
“You’re not going to tell my dad, are you?” Not that I cared what he thought, but I wasn’t in the mood for another one of his lecture-and-beatings.
“We’re on the same team, you and me,” she whispered, pretending like my hand on her breast was the most natural thing in the world. My eyes trailed up to her pretty face. Her hollow cheeks and hollow eyes were shadowed, covered up by layers of makeup. For the longest time, I wondered why she wore so much of it, and then I saw the bruises. “We’re stuck here. We’re bound to him. What if I told you there was something we could do to make ourselves feel better about our… situation? Don’t you want to feel vindicated, Jensen? Satisfied?”
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Scratch that—I knew damn well what she was getting at. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.
“You’re testing me.” I retract my hand from her bra cup.
“Oh, but I’m not.” Her face fell, morphing into something I could only describe as the greediest lust I’d ever seen in my entire life. “He punishes us all the time. Let’s give him something to punish us for.”
“Why don’t you just leave him?”
I was sixteen. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t leave unless I wanted to dive headfirst into foster care, but Juliette? She could walk out the door at any time and never look back.
“It’s complicated,” she cooed, raking her pink fingernails through my hair and pouting. She reached back and unhooked her bra, her double-D tits bouncing into a perky position. Her nipples hardened. “Adult stuff. Someday, you’ll understand.”
She climbed onto my lap, sending my cock throbbing. Grabbing fistfuls of my shirt, she tugged it over my head before pressing me back onto my mattress. “God, Josiah would be so pissed if he knew…”
Every beating. Every harsh word. Every hypocrisy. They all rushed through my mind at the same time, painting a picture of the monster that lived and breathed and abused us both for no other reason than to build himself up, make himself stronger.